It was during a halt on this march, I remember, that Hayter suddenly exploded into a fit of (apparently) causeless merriment. I asked him what was the matter. He chuckled and said, "If only it would not cost so much," and stopped and laughed again.
I did not understand, and asked him to explain further.
He pointed to Johann, who was going through one of his quaint, domestic exercises, and said, "I wish we could get that beauty to London, and dump him down in (say) Willis's rooms, and bribe a waiter to put a smart luncheon in front of him, and then watch from a distance to see the result."
It was a luscious theme, and we enlarged on it with infinite enjoyment.
We pictured the result of taking Johann back to our native Islands and launching him upon Society. It would be a thing quite easily done, and as it happened I knew a parallel case where it was carried out, and many who read this will probably recollect (perhaps with some discomfiture) the hero of it. The matter happened quite recently.
Now, who remembers it? There arrived at Liverpool by a B. and A. steamer not four years ago a jet-black negro from the West Coast of Africa. He had a little money and more self-confidence than any white man on earth ever possessed. He wanted to have a good time in England, and he had it. He had come up from the Coast on the B. and A. boat in the ordinary second-hand clothes of civilisation, because, of course, plenty of people on board knew him for what he was. But once ashore in a London hotel (which is a very long way from a Liverpool quay or the West Coast of Africa), he took off his shoes and socks and started sandals and bare legs, he doffed his trousers and coat and shipped long embroidered robes of green and white, clapped a Haûsa hat on his head in place of the brown billy-cock, and announced that he was Prince H'umaduya, of some unpronounceable place behind the British Gold Coast.
Did any one doubt his statement? Not a soul who cared to speak. Childish, snobbish London took him at his own valuation, and competed for the honour of fêting him. He went everywhere, did everything, was fawned upon by everybody. White women waited on him--because he was a prince. The Lord Mayor gave him a dinner--because he was a prince. And he accepted it all with the self-assurance he had learned professionally, and asked for more.